Yacouba Sawadogo, African farmer who saved the desert, dies at 77

Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer known in Burkina Faso as “the man who defeated the desert” for revolutionizing farming methods and creating a 75-hectare forest on arid land, died on December 3 in Ouahigouya, a northern provincial capital of that West African country. . He was 77.

His death, in a hospital after a long illness, was confirmed by his son Loukmane Sawadogo.

Mr Sawadogo, a thin, silent man who never learned to read or write, received a hero’s welcome when he returned to landlocked Burkina Faso in 2018 after winning the Right Livelihood Prize in Stockholm, which was awarded in 1980 was established to honor social and environmental activists. A crowd greeted him at the airport in Ouagadougou, the country’s capital, and he was received by the country’s president at the time.

Years earlier, villagers in his arid, windswept country to the north had thought he was crazy for making a simple improvement in an age-old water conservation technique. But Mr. Sawadogo had the last laugh: The forest he created, with more than 60 species of trees and shrubs, had no equal in the Sahel, the semi-desert region that stretches across the top third of Africa, forestry experts said.

The encroachment of the Sahara, fueled by decades of indiscriminate felling of trees and now climate change, with reduced rainfall, poses a major threat to an already vulnerable region. Large areas of land have been cleared of trees, from the Gulf of Guinea to the desert.

By the end of his life, Mr. Sawadogo was recognized as one of the few who had successfully pushed back. Farmers using his techniques have more than tripled their grain yields, in an area where agriculture depends on scarce rain. Burkina Faso, the 22nd poorest country in the world, has an average life expectancy of less than 63 years.

Chris Riej, a Dutch geographer and senior fellow at the World Resources Institute in Washington, said of Mr. Sawadogo in a telephone interview: “He has single-handedly had more impact on soil and water conservation than all the experts combined.” He added: “He managed to build a forest from scratch, a 30-hectare forest with the greatest biodiversity in the Sahel. Ultimately he became something of a national hero.”

Mr Sawadogo won the United Nations Champions of the Earth award in 2020. Luc Gnacadja, former head of the UN anti-desertification programme, said in an interview from neighboring Benin: “He was exceptional. An entire zone that had become desert-like was transformed.”

Mr Gnacadja invited Mr Sawadogo as a keynote speaker for a high-level conference in Switzerland. “He humbly explained what he had done,” he said, “and he left us a legacy that shows that ecosystem degradation is not inevitable.”

Mr. Sawadogo had an almost mystical relationship with the trees he created — the marula, the acacia, the gum arabic, the desert date tree — and treated them “like people,” his cousin Arouna Sawadogo said in an interview from Burkina Faso. When arsonists, jealous of Mr. Sawadogo’s success, burned his forest several times in the 2000s, the cousin said, Mr. Sawadogo was “an old man with a sad face; it remained in ashes for several days.”

But he always came back and said to his son Loukmane, one of his 27 children by three wives: ‘Even if I have a little strength left, even for one minute, if a tree needs to be planted, I will do it. ”

It took years of hardship – drought, famine and shifting political winds in a country where strongmen, rulers alternate through coups – for Mr Sawadogo to achieve his transformation from suspicious outsider to respected figure sought after by farmers across the Sahel goods. his counselor.

“Some people just do what they want with our forests,” Mr. Sawadogo said in a 2010 film about him:The man who held back the desert”, from British producer and director Mark Dodd. “If you are serious and start doing work that others don’t appreciate, they treat you like crazy.”

He recalled, “People didn’t even want to talk to me. They said I was crazy.”

Mr. Sawadogo’s heresy revolved around transforming the practice of what local farmers called zaï: digging small holes to collect precious rainwater. These farmers usually waited until the beginning of the rainy season, at the beginning of summer, to dig the zaï.

But Mr. Sawadogo started long before that, when the earth was bone dry. And he dug the holes wider and deeper. He put dung and stones in the bottom of it. He used termites to help disrupt the country. The manure contained seeds. When the rains came, the rocks helped hold the water, and the water turned the seeds into seedlings, which he nurtured. After the rains, the soil remained moist for several weeks.

“The results were striking; the soil improved along with his crop yield,” the UN said in announcing his award. “He was able to make trees grow in the barren ground.”

Mr. Sawadogo eventually helped the process by planting trees himself. Trees protected crops from the wind.

“As soon as I understood how important trees were, I started planting the forest,” he said in the film. Mr Reij of the World Resources Institute said: “For him, the trees became more important than the grains.”

Yacouba Sawadogo was born on January 1, 1946 in Gourga, a village about 180 kilometers north of Ouagadougou, the son of Adama Sawadogo, a farmer, and Fatimata Bilem. When he was very young, his parents sent him to a Koranic school in Mali where, he recalled in the film, the school’s leader told him he was destined for great things.

When he returned home as a teenager, he opened a motorcycle parts stall in the market in Ouahigouya, the provincial capital. It was a success, allowing him to set aside money. But he was restless and longed to return to the country, he later told interviewers. What worked against him was the impending drought that devastated the Sahel from the mid-1970s, when he left the market, until the mid-1980s.

Rainfall fell by 30 percent. Entire villages were abandoned because farmers could no longer feed their families. “It was a bit of an environmental disaster,” Mr Reij said. It became urgent to conserve what little rainfall there was and use it productively. Mr. Sawadogo started experimenting.

The improved zaï – he also added millet seeds to the pits – tripled his grain yield, allowing him to feed his family for three years, he said. interviewer in 2011.

In the 1990s, researchers and farmers alike came to study his methods; Niger alone sent thirteen farmers. Fame for Mr. Sawadogo and travels abroad followed. He attended a United Nations COP conference on climate change and testified before congressional staff in Washington.

“It was a bit like the trees he wanted to protect, simple and accessible,” Luc Damiba, a honey producer and film festival director in Burkina Faso, said in an interview.

After the latest fire, the government, at the insistence of Burkina citizens, built a fence around Mr. Sawadogo’s forest, Mr. Reij said.

In addition to his son Loukmane, Mr Sawadogo is survived by his three wives, Safiata, Khaddar Su and Raqueta, and his 26 other children.

“He managed to find means to cope with the drought,” Mr Gnacadja said. “That’s called adaptation.”

Herve Taoko contributed reporting from Ouagadougou.